Brian Merchant: The writers' strike is only the beginning. A rebellion against AI is underway

So far, the story of the AI boom has been the one that the tech industry has wanted to tell: Silicon Valley companies creating AI services that can mimic human art and words and, according to them, replace millions of jobs and transform the economy.

The next chapter is about humans fighting back. If the robots are rising, then a rebellion is taking shape to stop them — and its vanguard can be seen in the crowds of striking writers assembled across Hollywood.

One of those workers put it to me bluntly on the picket line, where screenwriters were protesting, among other things, the entertainment industry's openness to using artificial intelligence to churn out scripts: "F— ChatGPT."

But it's not just screenwriters — the movement includes illustrators, freelance writers and digital content creators of every stripe. "Every day," the artist and activist Molly Crabapple tells me, "another place that used to hire human artists has filled the spot with schlock from (AI image generator) Midjourney. If illustrators want to remain illustrators in two years, they have to fight now."

Each week brings more companies , Twitter threads about , and pseudo-academic reports about how vulnerable . So, from labor organizing to class-action lawsuits to campaigns to assert the immorality of using AI-generated works, there's an increasingly aggressive effort taking shape to protect jobs from being subsumed or degraded by AI.